How the Edukoya platform is seeking the ‘nirvana of education’

Personalising education to each child is quite a mission but Honey Ogundeyi is trying to get there with her platform. She tells Heather Martin she wants to educate a billion learners around the world

Edukoya already has 456 million subscribers (Edukoya)

Honey Ogundeyi is the granddaughter of a princess and went to a prestigious government-funded secondary school in Lagos. It was called Queens College. She still remembers where she sat. “I was a fourth-row kid and sat next to the window – I used to just climb in and out because the louvres had fallen off. We were three to a desk and I would fight to be on the edge, not squeezed in the middle.” Fourth-row kids didn’t get much attention in a class of 100. “With the best will in the world, there’s only so many people a teacher can teach at the same time.”

As founder and CEO of mobile-driven education platform Edukoya, it’s hardly surprising that Honey believes “the nirvana of education” is the ability to personalise education for each child. “The scale of my mission is quite audacious,” she says. “I want to educate a billion learners.”

Honey is focused on solutions, whether it’s getting out of the classroom or setting up her own online shopping platform (Fashpa, Nigeria’s answer to Asos) to source the right pair of shoes. The pioneering spirit is baked in. Her first job was in Brussels with McKinsey & Company, which she joined in the expectation they would open an office in Nigeria, but deciding “it wasn’t happening quick enough”, she returned home to join Ericsson instead. She spent the next few years advising telecom clients how to bring the internet to more Nigerians, before being headhunted by the global office in Stockholm. It was another high-flying position but her heart was elsewhere, so she swapped it out to lead a brand management project for the company across Africa instead. “There was always this pull between these great opportunities in Europe, but feeling very strongly that my future was in Nigeria.”